The Village Near Mayapan

Chapter One: Planting Day

Song for the First Rain

Sing Maize and Bean and Squash, good men!Sing them while the ground is black!Three in a hole and a foot of earthAnd the rain to bring them back.

Rain in the night! Rain in the night!Lie still and hear it start.Rain on the thatch and rain in the holeWhere the seed lies in the dark.

The rain came in the night.

Balam heard it begin. First there were single drops striking the thatch above him, slow, one and then another, like a finger tapping. Then the taps ran together, and then the whole roof was roaring, and under the roar he could hear water running off the eaves and hitting the ground outside in a line.

Father got up in the dark. Balam saw his shape cross the room and stand in the doorway. He stood there a long time with the rain coming down beyond him, and the air that came in past him was cool and smelled of wet ash and wet stone. All through the dry months the air had smelled of dust and smoke. This was a new smell, and Balam lay on his mat and breathed it.

"Tomorrow we plant," Father said. He was not talking to anyone. He said it the way a man says a thing to fix it in place.

Balam thought he would stay awake and listen to the rain all night, but the rain was still going when Mother woke him, so he must have slept.

It was black outside, and cold the way mornings are cold after rain. Mother had the fire up and was kneeling at the grinding stone, working the maize that had cooked and soaked all night with white lime, the powder of burned stone, and the stone made its sound, the long push and the short pull, the sound that morning made every day of Balam's life. Nikte was still asleep with one fat little arm over her face. Mother ground and patted and wrapped, and the smell of the fire and the wet ground came in the door together.

Father took down the seed. The chosen ears of maize hung in their husks high under the roof, where mice could not reach, tied in bunches, white ones and yellow ones and some dark red the color of dried blood. Father had picked those ears himself at harvest, from the best plants, and hung them, and all through the dry season they had waited over the family's heads.

Now he shucked the ears by the fire and shelled the kernels into a planting gourd. A gourd grew in the garden like a squash, but it was not for eating; it was grown for its shell, and dried until it was hard and light, and then it was cut into whatever was needed, a bottle or a bowl or a dipper or a rattle, and nearly everything in the house that held anything was a gourd of one shape or another. Balam sat and watched Father's thumbs strip the rows of kernels into this one. Every little while Father's thumb flicked sideways, and a kernel went into the fire instead of the gourd: one shrunken, one furred gray with mold, one with a pinhole in it where something small had eaten out the heart.

"Is it good seed?" Balam asked.

"It is good seed. Most of it, and the fire is getting the rest. It came from good ears. Your grandfather chose the mother of this seed, and his father chose the mother of that one." He set the bare cobs by the fire, where they would be fuel. From two small gourds stopped with corncob plugs he added the black bean seed and set aside the squash seed, flat and pale. "Seed is the oldest thing we own."

They ate maize gruel, hot and thick, and Father ate quickly and went out while it was still dark. He took his own planting stick down from the roof poles, where it had waited since the last planting, and then he cut a new stick for Balam. Balam heard it from inside: the knock, knock of the stone axe on a sapling, and then a long quiet, and then the scrape, scrape of a chert flake shaving the point, for chert is a stone that splits thin and sharp, and a fresh flake of it cuts cleaner than the axe.

When Balam came out, the sky in the east was gray and Father handed him the stick. It was as tall as Balam's chin, cut from a hard young tree, the end shaved to a flat point and the point hardened in the fire, still warm from it. Balam pressed the point into the mud of the dooryard and it went in clean.

"That is a planting stick," Father said. "It is a tool. It is not a spear and it is not a toy. When we are done you will clean it and put it in the roof, and next year it will be waiting for you, the way mine waited for me."

"Yes, Father," Balam said.

They walked out while the village was waking. Smoke stood up straight from the houses because there was no wind, and the whole world dripped. Water lay in the hollows of the limestone, gray sheets of it, and Balam walked through one on purpose and felt it cold on his ankles. Uncle was on the path ahead of them with his two big sons, all of them carrying sticks and seed gourds, and other men were coming out of other doorways, and nobody said much, but everyone was walking the same direction, out of the village and south along the path to the fields.

The milpa was Father's field, cut out of the woodland. Father and Uncle had cut the brush and trees on it early in the dry season, and the cut wood had lain and cured in the sun, and in the hottest weeks they had burned it. Balam had watched the burning from the village, the smoke going up in a brown wall, and for days afterward the smell of it had been on everything, on the food and the sleeping mats and in Nikte's hair.

Now the field lay black and open under the gray sky. The big stumps still stood in it, charred, and the ground between them was ash and burned stubble, and the rain had beaten the ash flat and slicked it. All around the field the low woodland stood dripping, some branches still bare from the dry season and others bright with new leaf, and the field lay in the middle of it like a mat spread on a floor.

Father stopped at the edge and looked at it a long time.

"The burn was good," he said. "The rain came when it should. Now the work is ours."

He took his gourd of gruel-water and walked along the field's edge to its eastern side, where the sun would come up over it, and Balam followed him and stood behind him. Father poured a little of the gruel out onto the burned ground there, in four small pours, and spoke while he poured, in a low voice. He was praying to the spirits of the field, the guardians who watched it when no man was there, asking them to take the planting, to send rain behind it, and to keep the animals from the seed. Then he stood quiet for a moment, and then he plugged the gourd and hung it on a stump, and that was the end of it.

"Now watch," he said.

He set his feet, and drove the point of his stick down into the ground at an angle, and rocked it, and pulled it out. The hole it left was half a hand deep and the wet black earth held its shape. He took seed from the gourd at his hip without looking at it and dropped it in the hole, and Balam heard the kernels tick against each other going down. Then Father swept the earth over the hole with the side of his foot and pressed it once, and stepped forward one long pace, and drove the stick down again.

"The earth is not the same everywhere," he said, planting as he talked. "Where it lies deep, four maize. Where the stone is near and the earth is thin, three, so they do not starve each other. A bean goes in with them in some holes, because the bean will climb the maize when they are both grown, the way you would put two friends in one canoe." Step, strike, rock, drop, cover. "One long step between holes. Closer, they starve. Farther, the field is wasted."

He went down the field like that, not fast and not slow. His holes kept their spacing, one long step and one long step, but the line of them bent where the stone rose near the top of the ground, because a planting stick cannot argue with stone, and so his row curved through the field, giving way to the stone and never losing its direction.

Then he came back and stood over Balam and filled a small gourd for him, maize and beans together.

"For you the count is simple," he said. "Three maize and one bean, every hole, until your hand knows more than that. Your row is here. Two of your steps between holes. Two of yours make one of mine. Begin."

Balam set his feet the way Father had. He drove the stick down and it stopped, jarring his arms up to the shoulders. He had hit stone. Everywhere under the field, under the whole world, the gray stone lay close beneath the skin of the earth, and a planting stick had to find the earth between.

"Move the width of your hand and try again," Father said. "The stick tells you where the ground is deep. Listen through your arms."

Balam moved the stick and drove it down and this time it went in, not clean like Father's, but in. He rocked it the way Father had rocked it and pulled it out and there was a hole. It was not as deep as Father's holes and it was not as round, but it was a hole, and he crouched and counted three maize and a bean out of his gourd and dropped them in and heard them ticking down, and covered them with his foot and pressed.

He had planted. The seed was his hand's work now, under the ground where he had put it.

"Again," said Father.

Balam took two steps and drove the stick down.

The sun came up over the trees while they worked, and the gray burned off the sky, and the field began to steam. The wet ash gave up its water in the heat and the whole field smoked faintly, as if the burn were still in it. Balam's stick found stone, and found deep ground, and found stone again, and his arms learned the difference the way Father said they would, so that after a while he knew before the stick struck whether the hole would come. His row wandered. Father's rows bent where the stone made them bend, but Balam's went wide between them like a path a dog makes, and it grew slowly, while Father's rows were laid down one after another across the field. Still, every hole in Balam's row had its count, and every hole was covered and pressed.

His arms burned first, then his hands. A blister rose at the base of his thumb where the stick turned, and he shifted his grip and kept on. Sweat ran into the corners of his mouth and tasted of salt and ash. When he straightened his back it ached in a new place, low down, a working man's place, and he stood a moment with his hands on it the way Uncle stood, and looked back down his row, and then bent to the stick again.

Across the burned ground the other men worked their own fields, Uncle and his sons on the next milpa, and beyond them old Mak, who planted alone and slowly, and the sound of the morning was the sound of sticks striking earth, near and far, no rhythm to it and no end to it, all across the black fields between the dripping walls of the woodland.

At midday Mother came down the path with the food, and Nikte trotted beside her carrying the water gourd in both arms like a fat baby. They sat on the field's edge in the shade of the standing trees, and Mother unwrapped the food.

The tamales came out of their leaves steaming. All morning they had ridden wrapped in a cloth, and the leaves had kept the heat in them, and when Balam peeled the leaf back the maize inside was soft and white with a seam of black beans through the middle, and the smell of it went up with the steam. He ate the first one too fast and burned the roof of his mouth and did not slow down. There was a second tamal for each of them, and inside the second one, folded into the maize, there was a strip of turkey meat, dark and salted, because planting was heavy work, and for heavy work there was meat. Mother stirred toasted maize meal into the water gourd until it was thick and clouded, and she trickled in honey from a little stopped gourd of it, honey from Father's own hives, and shook the gourd with her thumb over the mouth, and passed it. It was sweet and it tasted faintly of smoke, and Balam drank his share and held the gourd out and was given half a share more. Father ate leaning against a stump with his eyes half shut. When the tamales were done there were the leaves to lick, and Balam and Nikte licked them.

"Show me," Nikte said.

Balam took her to the end of his row. He made a hole with his stick, and put her fat little hand around the seeds, and held her wrist, and together they dropped them in. Nikte crouched and looked into the hole after them.

"Now they're gone," she said.

"They're not gone. They're planted." Balam covered the hole with his foot. "The rain goes down to them and they come up. You'll see it. Right there."

Nikte looked at the pressed dirt, and looked at Balam, and did not believe him, and Balam did not argue, because the maize itself would settle it.

Mother looked down the field at the work.

"Whose is the crooked row?" she asked, but her voice was not scolding.

"Mine," said Balam.

"His holes are honest," Father said. "The row can be crooked while the man is six. The holes cannot."

After they ate, Father took the flat pale squash seeds and walked the field with them, and planted them apart from everything, one hill of squash for many hills of maize, in the places where the ash lay deepest. "The squash does not climb and does not share," he said. "It runs along the ground and takes what it takes. It plants alone." Then he looked at the sky, which had begun to build white towers of cloud in the east, far off, over the woodland. "More rain behind those. We plant until it comes."

The afternoon was hotter. The blister on Balam's thumb broke and he wrapped his grip with a strip of leaf and went on. Partway down his row he came to a place where the earth looked wrong, and he stopped. Four of his holes had been dug open. The dirt was scraped aside in little heaps, and the seeds lay on top of the ground in the sun, and Nikte was crouched over the fifth hole with her arm in it up to the elbow.

"Nikte!"

"I'm looking at them grow," she said.

She had wanted to watch the maize come up, and so she had dug the seeds up to watch them. Nikte did not know that a seed only works under the ground.

Balam shouted for Mother, and Mother came, and Nikte was carried back to the shade at the field's edge with her legs kicking, saying that they were her seeds too, which they were not, and there she stayed for the rest of the afternoon, under Mother's eye. Balam knelt and planted the five holes over again, pressing each one twice, and he was angry the whole time, and being angry did not make the planting go any faster, which he noticed, and did not say.

"She is three," Father said from his row, without turning around. "The field will survive her. So will you."

Later the birds found them. The big black birds with the long tails came first, three of them, sliding down from the trees onto the planted ground and walking, tilting their heads, jabbing. Balam shouted and ran at them and they rose and slid away over the field and came down again where he was not.

"That is the other war," Father said. "Planting is the short work. Guarding is the long work. When the shoots come up, you and the other boys will keep the birds off, all day, every day, until the plants are past pulling."

"Every day?"

"Every day. A field is not planted once. It is planted every day until harvest, one way or another." He drove his stick down. "The birds are patient. Be more patient."

Balam threw a burned stick at the birds, and missed, and felt better anyway.

By late afternoon the cloud towers had come up over the whole eastern sky, dark underneath, and a wind ran ahead of them across the field, cool, smelling of rain, flattening the steam. All across the milpas the men straightened up and looked east and began gathering their gourds. Thunder came, still far away, a long slow tearing sound.

Father counted what was left of the seed and stopped the gourds. "Two more days and the field is in," he said. "We go home."

Balam cleaned his stick with a twist of grass, both the point and the shaft, and carried it on his shoulder the way Father carried his. His legs were heavy on the path, and the blister stung, and his back had the working man's ache in it, and he walked through every puddle without caring. Behind them the rain came onto the woodland; they heard it before it caught them, a hiss coming through the leaves, and then it caught them, warm and hard, and Nikte shrieked and ran ahead in it with her arms out, and Mother let her.

At home the fire was coaxed back and there was hot food, and Balam's wet clothes steamed on him until Mother made him change. Father set the planting sticks in the roof poles, Balam's beside his own. Outside, the rain settled into a steady beating on the thatch, and the fire was the only light, and they sat around it while Mother worked and Nikte leaned against her, half asleep, with her thumb near her mouth.

"When I was a boy," Father said, "I guarded my father's field at night. Did I ever tell you what came into the maize?"

"No," said Balam, although Father knew he had not, and Balam knew that he knew, and this was how a story began.

The Story of the Thing in the Maize

"When I was eight years old," Father said, "the maize stood higher than my head, and the ears were filling, and that is the time when everything that walks comes to a field. My father built a watch hut on the edge of the milpa, four poles and a little roof of thatch, with a sleeping mat up off the ground, and it was my work to sleep there through the ripening, and to wake, and to listen, and to make trouble for anything that came.

"The first nights I did not sleep at all. The field is a different country in the dark. The maize talks to itself. Every leaf that turns over sounds like a footstep, and every rat is a deer, and every deer is something worse. I lay with a gourd rattle in one hand and a stick in the other and my eyes as wide as an owl's, and nothing came, night after night, and so, as boys do, I stopped listening. And one night, deep in the night, the field woke me.

"It was not a leaf turning over. It was a great tearing and a crunching and a breaking of stalks, over on the far side, and not one animal but many, moving through my father's maize and eating it as they went. In the dark I could not see them. I could only hear them, and what I could hear had many legs and many mouths and no fear at all.

"I will tell you the truth, because you will guard a field yourself, and you should know how it is. My legs did not want to go. I stood at the edge of the maize with the rattle in my hand, and my heart was going like a woodpecker, and my legs said to me, a thing that big eats boys.

"But I was the guard. There was no one else. Whatever was in the maize, it was in my father's maize. So I filled my chest and I shook the rattle and I roared, and I ran into the dark field making every noise I owned.

"And the field burst apart around me. Wild pigs. A whole herd of them, big sharp-backed pigs of the woods, and they had been feasting all along the far rows, and when I came roaring they went off through the maize like a landslide, squealing, breaking everything before them, and one of them ran straight against my legs in the dark and sat me down hard in the dirt, and went over me, and was gone. And then the field was quiet, and I sat in the middle of it, in the mud, in the broken stalks, listening to my heart.

"I sat there until it was gray in the east, because my legs had had enough of me for one night. And in the morning my father came out to the field, and he stood a long time looking at the far rows, where the pigs had eaten, and at the middle rows, where the pigs had run, and there was not much difference between them.

"'You drove them off,' my father said.

"'Yes,' I said.

"'You saved the field,' my father said. 'Most of it.'

"And he never said another word about it, but at the harvest, when we came to the broken rows, he would look at them, and then he would look at me, and I carried those looks a long time. Longer than the bruise." Father put a stick on the fire. "The pigs were not the lesson. The lesson was the nights before the pigs, when I stopped listening. A guard is not brave once. A guard is awake every night, and that is a harder thing than brave."

Balam looked into the fire and saw himself in a watch hut, in the tall maize, in the dark. His own field was one day old, and the maize in it was still asleep under the ground, and already the nights were coming when it would stand higher than his head and he would lie listening.

"Bed," said Mother.

Balam lay on his mat with his hands sore in a good way, opening and closing them. Nikte was asleep before her head was down. The fire sank, and Father and Mother stayed beside it, and their voices dropped into the low evening talk that was not for children, and Balam, half gone, heard pieces of it under the rain.

"Mak's rows are shorter this year," Father said.

"He says the field is enough for him," Mother said.

"The field was enough for three, once. Now it is him alone, and half of it is going back to the woods." The fire ticked. "When ours is in, I will take my stick over and put in his far rows. If I ask him, he will refuse. So I will not ask him."

"He will know it was you."

"He will know it was somebody," Father said. "That is as much as he needs to know."

Mother said something too low to hear, and Father laughed once, quietly, and the rain went on.

Out in the dark the field lay under the rain, and the water was going down into the holes, one hole and then another, his row and Father's rows and the five holes planted twice, all the way to the far trees.

Chapter Two: The Honey Harvest

Song for the Honey Taking

The lady bee has got no sting,And never stung a man,But she will bite a hurried boyAs only ladies can.

Go slow, go slow, with settled heart,However sweet the prize,For fifty bees were in the hairOf one who was not wise.

Take a share and leave a shareAnd seal the door with clay,And there'll be honey in the logPast your children's day.

The maize was up.

It had come the way Balam told Nikte it would come, first a folded green point pushing out of the pressed dirt, then a blade, then two blades, one hole and then another down the rows, until the whole black field was striped with green. Even the five holes that Nikte had dug open came up with the rest, and Balam walked her out to see them, and she looked at the little plants a long time and said they were hers, and Balam let it go, because arguing with Nikte was planting seeds on stone.

Now the plants stood as tall as Balam's knee, and it was his work, with the other boys of the village, to walk the fields from first light and keep the birds off, shouting and throwing, all day, the long work, just as Father had said.

But this morning Father stopped him at the door.

"Not the field today," Father said. "Uncle's boys will watch our rows with theirs. Today we open the bees."

They went out around the house in the first light. The turkeys were awake in their pen and the pen steamed in the early sun and stank, and nobody minded, because that was the smell of the morning and always had been. Behind the house, under a low thatch roof with no walls, stood the bee logs. There were nine of them, lying on their sides on a wooden rack, out of the sun and out of the rain. Each log was as thick as a man's thigh and as long as Balam's arm, hollow all the way through, and each end was stopped with a round plug sealed tight with dried mud. Seven of the plugs were wood. On the two oldest logs the plugs were thin round disks of cut stone, and those two logs had come down from Father's grandfather. In the middle of every log was one small hole, and at every hole the bees came and went.

They were stout dark bees, each about as long as a maize kernel, with dull yellow marks. They did not sting. They had never stung anyone, because they had no sting to do it with; that was the kind of bee they were. But Balam knew better than to think that meant they were nothing. If their log was jarred they came at your face in a cloud, and they caught themselves in your hair and your eyelashes and bit with their small jaws, and the bites did not hurt much, but a boy with forty bees knotted in his hair wished very much that he had moved more slowly.

Father stood in front of the rack and was still for a moment, and said a few words in a low voice to the spirit who keeps the bees, the one the old men said watched over every hive, telling him that they had come to take a share of the honey and would leave the rest, and would take nothing from the young. Then he set his mantle aside and bared his arms.

"Now watch," he said. "And watch how I move, more than what I do."

He stood at the rack and did not touch it yet.

"A man's spirit sits in him like water in a jar," Father said. "When the jar is carried well, the water lies still. When the jar is knocked about, the water jumps, and everything near can see it jump. Hurry knocks the jar. Anger knocks it. Fear knocks it hardest of all. The bees cannot hear you and the bees cannot see much, but they know a jolted spirit the moment it comes under their roof, and they board a jolted man like a canoe. So before I touch a log, I let the water settle. Watch."

He was quiet, and his shoulders came down, and his breathing went long, and then he moved, and he moved the whole time the way water moves in a pot that is carried carefully.

Balam stood beside him and tried to feel whether his own spirit was settled. He could not find his spirit anywhere, which he supposed meant it was lying still.

On the top of every log, above the entrance hole, was a short cut mark, made with an axe long ago. "The mark points up," Father said. "Always. A log is never rolled. The bees build their rooms to fit the log lying just so, and if the log is rolled, the rooms tear loose and fall. A man who rolls a log wrecks a house he has never seen." He lifted the first log level and steady, the mark pointing up, and carried it to a cradle of two forked posts set in the ground, and laid it there, and then lowered one end until the log lay tilted, the low end over the wide clay bowl.

The bees came out of the entrance and hung over the log in a thin smoke of bees, and some walked on Father's bare arms and hands, and he let them walk.

"My father said they know the hands that carry them water in the dry season," he said. "And they know a stranger. And they know a man in a hurry, and they like him least of all."

With the point of a chert flake he cut the dried mud around the low end plug, and worked the plug loose, and drew it out. Then Balam crouched at the open end and looked inside.

He had expected hanging sheets of little rooms, all alike and all in rows, the way wasps built their gray paper nests. There was nothing like that. These bees did not build in rows at all. The end of the hollow log was packed with round pots, each one the size of a bird's egg, and no two quite the same. They were dark as smoked wood and soft-looking, and they were not set side by side so much as grown together, each pot joined to its neighbors wherever they touched, so that the whole end of the log was one heap of small dark pots sharing their walls. A few stood open at the top, half filled, where the bees were still filling them. The rest were sealed over smooth. Most held honey. Others were packed with yellow pollen, flower dust the bees gathered and stored, their own bread for the hungry season. And deeper in, past all the pots, the young lay in flat round layers stacked one above another like sleeping mats, and Father did not go near that part at all.

"The pots at the ends are the storehouse," Father said. "The young lie in the middle. We open the storehouse only. A man who breaks into the middle of a log kills the hive for one season's honey, and then he has no hive, and no honey, and no sense either."

He held the bowl under the tilted end, and with the flake he cut the honey pots low on their sides, one and then another, and the honey ran down out of them and along the low wood and into the bowl in a thin bright rope. It was not slow like tree sap. It ran quick, and it was thin, and the smell of it came up, honey and wax and something sharp underneath, like fruit just before it is too ripe. The pollen pots Father did not cut. "Their bread, not ours," he said.

"Nikte," Father said. "The gourd."

Nikte had been standing at the edge of the thatch with the honey gourd held against her chest in both arms, and she had been told to stand still, and she had actually done it. She came forward one careful step at a time, watching the bees in the air, and held the gourd out, and did not spill it and did not cry when a bee walked over her fist, and Father tipped the first bowl of honey in.

"Good," he said, and Nikte stood even straighter, and held the gourd tighter, and a little honey shone on her fingers where it had run over the lip, and she licked it when she thought no one was looking.

They went down the rack log by log. Not every log was opened. Father lifted each one first, level and steady, and felt its weight, and listened to it, and two of the nine he set back unopened.

"Why not those?" Balam asked.

"Light," Father said. "Their storehouse is thin. Take from a thin hive and it starves before the flowers come again. This is the small taking. The great harvest comes at the end of the dry season, when the whole forest is in flower and every pot is full. Now the heavy rains are coming, and in the heavy rains the flowers are few, and the bees live on what they have stored. So we take from the strong, and we take a share, not the whole. A man who empties his logs has honey once. A man who leaves a share has honey every year of his life, and his son has it after him." He set the log gently in its place. "These hives were your grandfather's. The two with the stone ends were his father's. The wood wears out and is changed, but the bees inside go on, mothers and daughters, older than any of us."

A green lizard had come out along the rack pole while he talked, and stood doing its little push-ups in the sun, watching the entrance hole of the nearest log. Father knocked it off the pole with the back of his hand, and it fell in the dust and whipped away into the weeds, and Father went on with what he was doing.

When Balam's turn came, Father chose a middling log, carried it to the cradle himself, and put the flake in Balam's hand.

"Cut the mud seal only. Around, like drawing a circle. The plug does the rest."

Balam knelt at the low end. The bees hung in the air by his face, and walked on the backs of his hands, small dry feet, and everything in him wanted to shake them off and be quick. He felt the wanting as a jump in his chest and a hum in his arms, and he knew what it was now. It was the water slopping in the jar. He made himself be slow. He breathed out long, the way Father breathed, until the jumping went down, and he drew the flake around the seal, and the dried mud came away in curls, and the plug loosened, and he drew it out whole.

Inside were the pots, side against side, shining where the light fell in.

"Cut low on each pot," Father said, "and let the log do the pouring."

Balam cut, and the honey came down the tilted wood in its thin bright rope into the bowl, and he had done it, and no bee had bitten him, and only three were in his hair, which Father picked out one at a time with his fingers, unhurt, and set into the air.

"You moved well," Father said. "Better than I moved at your age. I was quick, and I paid for it." He touched the side of his own head. "Fifty in my hair, and my father laughing too hard to help me. My spirit was not settled that day. It was running on ahead of me, and the bees met it coming."

Balam tried to see Father as a boy, with fifty bees in his hair and his own father laughing at him. He could not see it. He believed it anyway.

By midday the honey gourd was heavy, and the tall trade jar with the narrow neck was filled to its shoulders. Before Father closed the last log, he cut two whole honey pots free, carefully, and set them in a small bowl, one for Balam and one for Nikte. Then he plugged every open log and sealed the plugs with fresh mud, smoothing it with his thumb. At the last log he waited a moment before setting the plug, and let Balam look in once more. Already the bees were crowding onto the cut edges of the opened pots, working new wax and resin over them in the dark.

"By morning," Father said, "every pot we cut will be closed again, as if we had never come. They do not sit and grieve over a cut pot. They mend it. Remember that."

Then they sat down in the shade of the bee roof and ate.

The honey pot you ate whole. The wax and resin of it was soft enough to bite. You turned it in your fingers first, a little dark egg with the weight of honey moving inside, and you bit through the wall at the top, and the honey flooded out, quick and thin and sweet with the sharp taste underneath, and you had to drink it out of the pot faster than it could run down your wrist, and you could not, quite. When the honey was gone you ate the pot itself, folding the soft dark wax into a wad and chewing it, and the wax gave up sweetness slowly, less and less, for a long time, and when the last of the sweetness was gone you were left with a little gray cud of wax, which you were not to swallow and did not want to, and the whole thing, from first bite to spat-out cud, took a satisfyingly long time. Nikte ate hers in the dirt with her legs straight out in front of her and got honey to the elbows, and licked her arms up and down like a cat, and nobody minded.

The cut wax from the harvest Father did not throw away. He gathered every broken pot and pressed it all into a lump the size of two fists, for trade. At Mayapan, Father said, there were men who made things of metal, and they began with wax. They shaped the wax into the thing they wanted, a bell or a ring or a little animal. Then they covered the wax shape all over with clay and let it harden, and melted the wax out through a small hole, and poured hot metal into the empty place where the wax had been, and when they broke the clay away, there stood in metal what had been made in wax. So Father had heard it told. He had never seen it done.

"Where did the bees come from?" Balam asked. "In the beginning."

"Ours?" Father said. "Out of the woods. Everything we have came out of the woods, one way or another." He settled his back against the rack post. "The two logs with the stone ends. Did I ever tell you how the first of our bees came to this house?"

"No," said Balam, and Nikte stopped licking her arm to listen, because a story is a story, even to a person who is three.

The Story of the First Log

"Your great-grandfather," Father said, "had no bees at all. He was a young man with a new house and a new wife, and he had his field and his hands and nothing else. Honey he tasted when other men gave it, which was not often, and he wanted bees the way some men want a fine cloak, except that wanting a cloak gets you no cloak, and he was watching for his chance.

"One year, in the season of storms, a wind came in the night that broke trees all through the woodland. And when your great-grandfather went out days after, deep in the woods, hunting for what a storm leaves, he found a great old tree lying on its side with its trunk split, and in the split, packed in the dark, he saw the pots.

"A wild hive. The bees were already at work on the broken place, sealing it, the way bees do. Most men would have cut the hive open then and there, and eaten the honey, and gone home sticky and happy, and had honey once. Your great-grandfather sat down and looked at that tree for a long time. Then he walked home and got his axe, and walked back, and began to cut.

"Not into the hive. Around it. He cut the trunk a forearm above the pots and a forearm below the young, so that the whole hive, storehouse and rooms and young and all, lay inside one length of log. It took him the whole day and most of the next, cutting slow so the blows would not shake the hive to pieces, and the bees were on him the whole time. In his hair. In his ears. Walking on his eyes. Biting. He said afterward that his ears were fat as tamales for a week. And he did not hurry, because a jolted man cuts crooked, and he had one hive in the world and no second chance.

"When the log was free he stopped the ends with wood and packed mud over them, and he slung the log under a carrying pole, and he and his brother carried it home through the woods, slow and level, a half day's walk with the bees pouring out of the entrance and riding on their heads and shoulders the whole way. Men came out of the houses to watch them arrive. Two men walking slowly, carrying a log, wearing bees.

"He set that log up behind his house on two forked posts, in the shade, and the bees settled, and worked, and by the next year the log was heavy, and the year after that he split a daughter hive from it into a second log. And that winter he sat down with a piece of soft stone and ground two round disks for the ends of the mother log, because wood rots and stone does not, and he meant those bees to outlast him. And they have. The daughters of the daughters of that wild hive are in every log on this rack, and the stone he ground is on the two old logs, and you have eaten that storm-tree's honey today, and so has your sister, and she is wearing some of it."

Nikte looked at her arms, and licked them again.

"He got a whole hive for nothing," Balam said.

"He got a whole hive for two days of being eaten alive, and a half day of carrying, and a winter of grinding stone," Father said. "That is not nothing. That is the price. It only looks like nothing from far away." He stood up and brushed the wax scraps from his lap. "Most good things look like luck from far away. Come. The ants."

The last work of the day was the ants.

"Everything in the world wants honey," Father said. "Not only boys. Ants most of all. Ants can pass where a deer cannot, and an army of them can empty a log in a night and kill it dead." He showed Balam the legs of the rack. Around each leg, on the ground, lay a ring of ash from the cooking fire, wide as a hand. "Ants hate ash while it is dry and loose. Rain packs it down, and packed ash is only a floor to them. A leaf fallen across it is a bridge. So the ring must be laid fresh: wide, dry, loose. Keep it so, and leave no bridge. That work is now yours. Every evening, after the field, before the dark."

"Every evening?"

"Every evening. The bees cannot do it, and the honey cannot defend itself, and I am giving the work to you." He looked at Balam, not smiling. "And with the work, that log is yours to watch. The third one. Learn its weight. Learn its sound. Next year, at the great harvest, you open it, and what it gives is yours to trade."

Balam looked at the third log a long time. It looked like the other logs. It did not feel like the other logs.

That evening, before the dark came down, Balam went behind the house with a bowl of cold ash and went from leg to leg on his knees. Where the day's shower had packed a ring or a leaf had come down across one, he swept the old ash aside and sifted new ash through his fingers, loose and pale, in a wide ring, and lifted every leaf away. A line of small black ants was already working along the ground from the woodpile, feeling for a way, and where they crossed bare dirt Balam pressed them flat with his thumb, one and one and one, and laid his ash across their road, and the line broke up and wandered.

He had finished three legs when Nikte came around the house chasing a turkey, both of them at full speed, and the turkey went between the rack legs and Nikte went after it, straight through two fresh ash rings, and was gone around the far side of the house, and the turkey with her, and neither of them ever knew.

Balam looked at the two broken rings, at his own knee prints beside them, at the ash scattered in kicked fans across the dirt. He said one word that he had heard Uncle say when a pole fell on Uncle's foot. Then he swept the spoiled ash aside and laid both rings new, because ants do not care whose sister it was.

When the rings were done he put his ear against the third log. He could hear them inside, a low steady sound, like far-off rain that never came closer, thousands of small lives working in the dark of the wood, mending what the day had cut.

Inside the house, Mother's loom hung rolled on its peg, and the cloth rolled up inside it was two hands longer than it had been yesterday. When Mother wove, she tied one end of the loom to the house post and the strap of the other end around her own back, and leaned, and the cloth grew between her and the house. Now the trade jar stood on its shelf with the firelight moving on the fresh mud seal.

"Three days and the cloth comes off the loom," Father said, looking at the jar. "Then we go to Mayapan and trade, and we go promptly. This is thin honey, with much water in it, and in the wet season it sours if it waits. We trade it before it turns."

"The city?" Balam asked.

"The city."

Balam had seen Mayapan once, from far off, from a rise on the south road: a gray wall low across the whole horizon, and smoke standing above it from more fires than he could count. He had been small then. He had never been inside.

He went to his mat, and Nikte was asleep already, with one arm thrown out and honey still in the creases of her elbow, and the evening rain began on the thatch. By the fire, Father and Mother talked in the low voices, and Balam lay still and let the words come to him in pieces.

"Salt first," Mother said. "We are at the bottom of the salt."

"Salt first," Father said. "Then a blade. Mine is worn to a sliver. It has been a good blade, but I have sharpened it away, a little every year, and now there is more sharpening behind it than blade in front."

"And the lords' portion?"

"Woven and set aside. It goes to the collector before we trade a drop." The fire ticked. "The honey will do the rest. If the jar fetches what it should, there will be salt, and the blade, and cacao left over."

"Cacao," Mother said, in the voice of a person deciding whether to be pleased.

"A man who trades well drinks chocolate once a year," Father said. "It is not a law, but it is a custom, and I keep it."

Mother laughed low, and the talk went down into sounds that were not words, and the rain went on, and Balam thought of the wall on the horizon with all its smoke, and the third log with its thousand small lives, and the ash rings holding in the dark, until the rain and the thinking ran together, and it was morning.

Chapter Three: The White Road

Song for the Road

The star is up, the fire is out,The jar is corded down.Walk while the dark is cool, walk on,The white road knows the town.

Honey goes and salt comes home,And wax goes out for blade,So count with a slow and settled heart,For the count is how it's weighed.

The wall is long, the gates are small,The ways are loud with men,But the road that took you out at dawnWill take you home again.

On the third day the cloth came off the loom. Mother untied the loom bar from the house post and unrolled the whole length across the sleeping mats, and it reached from the door to the far wall, pale in the firelight, with the dark pattern running end to end without a break. Father walked its length and measured it against his forearm, hand over hand, and at the end of it he nodded, and named the count of beans a cloth of that length should fetch, and Mother rolled it up and bound the roll, and did not say what she thought it should fetch, which was more.

That evening everything was made ready. The tall trade jar was corded into a net of rope with a broad band to it, and Father set the band across his forehead and stood up with the jar riding his back, and walked the room once, and set it down by the door. The weight rides the band, he said, and the band rides the head, and the back only steadies it. The empty salt basket was tied down over the jar's mouth, and the two cloths were rolled together in Mother's carrying net, the patterned one for trade and the lords' portion, woven long before and set aside, wrapped apart from it in plainer cloth. The wax was bound up in leaves for Balam to carry, and Mother slung the tamales and the water gourds for herself. Nikte watched everything being made ready, and said that she was coming.

"The road is longer than your legs," Mother said. "You will sleep at Grandmother's, and we will bring the road home to you."

Balam lay down when he was told to, and lay a long time with the city in his head — the wall the way he had seen it once, far off, with its smoke standing over it — and then Mother's hand was on his shoulder, and there were stars in the doorway, and the night had gone by without him noticing it go. They ate quickly by the fire, and Father carried Nikte through the dark to Grandmother's house, asleep, and she changed hands without waking. Then they took up their loads and went out under the stars, and Uncle's oldest son was already on the path to the fields, going to watch their rows along with his own, and he lifted a hand to them in the dark, and they lifted hands back, and that was all the talking anyone did for a long time.

The path was cold mud under Balam's feet, and the woods on both sides dripped and ticked, and somewhere in them a bird said one thing over and over and never anything else. By first gray they were on paths Balam did not know, and other people were on them, coming in from side paths with loads: a man bent under a stack of pots nested one inside another; two women with baskets of chilis on their backs; a man they smelled long before they saw him, carrying dried fish bound in flat bales, and behind him a boy carrying more. Everyone walked the same direction, and nobody said much, but the paths kept joining, and every time they joined there were more people walking, the way rainwater finds rainwater, running off the same roof.

Then the path climbed a low rise and gave onto the white road.

It was wider than the floor of their house, and it stood up out of the ground to the height of Balam's knee, and it ran away to the north farther than he could see, pale as ash in the gray light, with the dark line of people moving along it. Its sides were straight, and its top was flat and hard, and after the cold mud of the paths it was strange under Balam's feet.

"Who made it?" Balam asked.

"Men made it," Father said. "A road like this is laid the way a floor is laid. Big stones first, then small stone beaten flat, then white plaster over all of it. It stands up above the ground, so the rain runs off it and leaves it dry. Mud never holds this road." He shifted the jar on his back. "That is why everything walks here. The road is faster than the ground."

The sun came up on their right hand while they walked, and the road turned pink with it, and then white again, and the day's heat began. Far ahead, over the trees, smoke stood in the sky — many smokes, leaning together, from more fires than a man could count on all his fingers many times over. And before there was any wall to see, there were houses: house-places sitting along the road behind low stone walls, with swept ground inside, and garden plots, and shade trees, and their own morning smoke, thicker and thicker along the way, so that the country had already stopped being country when the trees opened and Balam saw the wall itself.

He had seen it once before, from far off, a gray line lying across the whole horizon, and he had thought that a wall which showed from so far away must stand over a man the way the forest stands over the path. But when the road brought them under it at last, it stood no higher than Father's shoulder in places, gray stone fitted dry, broad enough on top that men were walking along it. What it had was not height. It went away to the east and it went away to the west, low and even, and there was no end of it either way, only distance. It did not need to be tall. It was long, and behind it was the city.

The gate was narrow — hardly wider than the door of their own house — and the crowd pressed into a single file and went through one at a time, loads scraping the stone on both sides. Balam went through with his fist closed in the hem of Father's mantle, and then the city was around him.

It was house-places pressed close together, low walls of dry stone dividing one family's ground from the next, and inside each one swept earth, a cooking shelter, a sleeping house, a tree kept for its shade, and people at every kind of work. The lanes that ran between the walls were narrow and full, and there were more people in the first of them than Balam had seen in his whole life all together. The noise lay over everything the way heat lies over the field at midday: it came from everywhere, it had no edges, and it did not stop. And under the voices, out of every house-place, came the sound of grinding stones, stone riding on stone with the soaked maize between — the same long push and short pull that morning made at home, but many, so many together that they ran into one sound, like water. Once, where the roofs opened, Balam saw far off above them a great stepped hill standing up into the sky, white with plaster, with stairs on its face and red painted along its top, and then the lane bent, and the roofs closed, and it was gone.

They went first with the lords' portion. In an open place near the gate stood a long low platform with a thatch roof on posts, and men in fine mantles sat there on mats, and all morning long the country came to them and set things down: cloth on cloth, every cloth with its own pattern; baskets of maize; turkeys bound and complaining. A man took their cloth and unrolled a forearm's length of it and ran his thumb across the weave, and nodded once, and laid it on the pile, and Father stood the way he stood at the bee rack, still, with a quiet face, and then it was done and they walked away.

"Why first?" Balam asked.

"Because it is owed," Father said. "What is owed is paid first. After that the day is ours, and no man can call us back to it."

Beyond the platform, in a great open place, was the market. Cloths were stretched on poles against the sun, rows and rows of them, and under every cloth a mat, and on every mat goods, and behind every mat a trader. Salt stood in gray-white heaps in baskets. Chilis lay drying in red hills. Pots stood nested to the height of a man, and there was dried fish stiff as bark, and bundles of blue and green feathers, and cotton in white heaps, and dark lumps of copal, the hardened sap of a tree that is burned not for cooking but for praying, because its smoke is sweet and rises straight, and the smell of it reached across the whole lane.

In the market, a child stood beside his father and said nothing while men traded. Balam knew this without being told, the way he knew a tool from a toy.

Father went first to a man whose mat held nothing but jars. The man drew the plug of the trade jar and dipped a smooth stick and tasted, and looked at nothing at all while he tasted, and then he and Father spoke quietly, in numbers. When they were done the man counted beans out onto a spread cloth — small dark beans, hard, each the size of a thumbnail — in piles of twenty, and Father watched each pile grow and said nothing, and when all the piles were pushed across, Father counted them again, pile by pile, slowly, and the buyer waited, and nobody thought the waiting strange. Then the honey went out of the trade jar in its thin bright rope, the last of the small taking, and after that the jar rode light.

The beans were cacao, and it seemed to Balam that everything in the market had its price in them. He watched them go from hand to hand down the whole lane — a basket of salt was so many, a turkey was so many — and the beans themselves were only seeds out of a pod, but nobody was eating them. Every hand that touched them counted.

Mother sold the patterned cloth in the row where cloth was sold. The woman who bought it measured it against her own forearm, hand over hand, the whole length, and named a count, and Mother stood with her hands folded and waited, and the woman named a better count, and the beans went into the same counting cloth at Father's waist. It was more than Father had said the cloth would fetch, and Mother did not mention this, and neither did Father, but Balam saw them not mentioning it.

"Salt first," Mother said then, and it was. The salt seller measured with a gourd and leveled every gourdful with a straight stick laid across its mouth, so that it held no more and no less, and Mother watched the stick, and the seller expected to be watched, and the salt went heavy into their own basket, and Father bought stout cord and slung the basket to carry.

Then the blades. They lay in rows on a dark cloth, long ones and short ones, and the seller took up a long one and drew it flat along his own forearm, and the hair came away in a little drift, and he blew it off the edge and laid the blade back down. One blade among them was green — deep green, and when he held it up the light came through its edge like light through water. "From the west," the seller said. "From mountains that smoke. It comes farther than the dark ones, and it costs more."

"No stone like any of these grows in ground that we walk," Father said to Balam. "There is no such stone in all this country. The road brings it, or nobody has it." He chose a dark blade the length of his hand, and turned it to see the light run along the edge, and counted out beans for it slowly, and the seller stood with his hands still and waited.

At the edge of the market, past the last mats, a man worked behind a low screen of poles and clay, and this was the caster. He kept a charcoal fire in a shallow pit, and gray clay shapes like large eggs stood warming beside it, and from the mouth of one of them came a thread of smoke and a slow dark run of melting wax. A boy not much older than Uncle's sons knelt at the fire's edge and blew through a long wooden tube tipped with clay, and where his breath went, the coals turned from red to white, and in the whitest place sat a small clay cup with metal in it. When the metal ran bright, the caster gripped the cup between two rods of green wood — cut fresh, still wet inside, so that they scorched and smoked but would not take fire in the little time he needed them — and poured the metal in a thin shining line into the mouth of a hot mold, and set the cup back, and the pouring had taken three breaths, start to finish.

"Two days of work stand inside that clay," the caster said, to nobody in particular, "and the pouring is three breaths of it."

On his mat lay little bells, gray-gold, none bigger than the end of a thumb, each with a slit like a closed mouth, and when he lifted a corner of the mat they all shifted and spoke at once. He took the wax lump from Balam and weighed it in one hand and then the other, and smelled it.

"Bee wax, clean," he said. "Two twenties of beans for this weight. Forty beans. And I break yesterday's molds when the sun stands highest. Bring the boy back then, and he can see what wax becomes."

Father had one errand left, cord to bind the blade for carrying, and the cord seller's mat was across the open place. "Mind the wax," Father said. "We are in sight." And he and Mother went, and the crowd closed and opened between them, so that sight came and went with it.

The man came from the side. He had rings of white shell in his ears and a voice pitched low and friendly, and he talked from the first breath and did not stop. He bought wax, he said, he bought it all day for the casters, he saved country people the standing about in the sun. His beans were already out. He counted fast, the beans ticking down into a folded leaf, and his voice ran on over the counting the whole time — the sun, the long road home, how busy Father was — and the count came to one twenty and five, and he held the leaf out to Balam and reached his other hand toward the wax.

The jump came up in Balam's chest, and the hum came into his arms, and everything in him wanted the man gone and the thing over, and he knew now what that wanting was. It was the water Father had talked about, jumping in the jar. He stood still and breathed out, long, the way you breathe out at the bee rack, and let the water settle. Then he did the thing a child did not do in the market.

"The count is short," he said. "The caster pays two twenties. You have counted one twenty and five."

And he took the wax up off the mat and held it against his chest in both arms, and waited.

The man laughed at him, and said the boy had counted wrong, and counted again, faster than the first time and with more talking over it, and the count came out at one twenty and five again, and he said that it was two twenties. Balam did not say the count again, because he had said it once, and it had not changed. He stood with the wax against his chest and looked at the middle of the man, and the man's voice rose.

And Father was there.

Father did not speak to the man at all. He stood beside Balam and looked at him, and the man remembered another business he had, and went to it, and his beans went with him.

"He offered one twenty and five," Balam said. "The caster said two twenties."

"The caster said it," Father said, "and the caster will pay it." He looked at Balam a moment longer than the words needed. Then he took up the salt basket, and that was all.

They ate the cold tamales in the shade under the wall, and passed the water gourd around, and watched the gate swallowing people and letting people out, until the sun stood highest. Then they went back to the caster's fire, and he brought out a mold that had been poured the day before and had cooled all night, gray and dusty, and set it on a flat stone and struck it with a stick, and the clay cracked and came away in pieces, the way the dried mud seal comes away from a bee log. Inside, where wax had been, stood a bell, with a stem of metal standing up from it where the metal had been poured in, and the caster gripped the stem and snapped it off, and picked the last crumbs of clay out of the slit with a thorn, and shook it, and it spoke.

Balam looked at it a long time. It was the thing Father had heard told and never seen: the wax runs out of the clay, and the metal goes in where the wax had been, and what was soft and could melt becomes a thing that rings and lasts. Now they had both seen it, and neither of them said anything.

The caster took the wax and counted two twenties of beans onto the mat. "Count them in," Father said, and pushed the counting cloth toward Balam, and Balam counted them into the cloth one at a time, twenty and then twenty again, with the caster and Father both waiting, and nobody thought the waiting strange.

Then Father kept his custom. Near the market's heart a woman stood between two tall jars, and what she sold she made in front of everyone: she poured from one jar into the other, holding the top jar high, and the drink fell in a long brown rope, and the foam rose on it and stood. Father counted beans to her for three cups, one for Mother too, because Mother had traded well, and Balam took his and drank.

He had thought it would be sweet. It was not sweet. It was bitter, and under the bitter came a slow warmth that was chili, and it was thick on the tongue, and it was nothing like honey. He drank all of his share, down to the foam at the bottom, and gave back the cup the way Father gave back his.

"Once a year," Father said, and finished his own.

At a mat of small clay things Father stopped once more and counted out beans for a little whistle shaped like a bird. "For the one who stayed home," he said. And at the blade seller's mat he bought a second blade, a small one, the length of Balam's hand, dark, and the seller wrapped its edge in a doubled leaf and bound it with cord.

"One for the man who counts," Father said, and gave it to him, and they walked to the gate.

The wall went away behind them, east and west, and the evening came on while they walked. The salt rode heavy on Father's back where the honey had ridden out, with the empty jar tied above it, and the beans rode small and heavy in the cloth at his waist, and Mother's net carried the day's small things, and Balam carried the blade — in both hands as far as the gate, in one hand as far as the woods, and after that against his chest. The ground lost the light, and the white road kept it, pale, and they walked on the pale, and by the woods Balam's legs had the whole day in them, and the blade was no weight at all.

"Did I ever tell you," Father said, "about the first time I traded alone?"

"No," said Balam, and this time it was true, and Father laughed once.

The Story of the Short Count

"When I was ten years old," Father said, "my father sent me to the crossroads market, a morning's walk east of here, with two small gourds of honey, alone. I went down that path as tall as a roof pole, because I was a trader now, going to trade.

"At the market a man came to me before I had even set the gourds down. He had a friendly voice, the friendliest voice I had ever heard, and he admired the honey, and he admired me, and he said he would take both gourds and spare me the waiting. And he counted his beans into my hand fast, the way rain comes off an eave, and he talked over the counting the whole time — what a fine morning, what a strong boy, what a lucky man my father was. And I closed my hand on the beans, and I thanked him."

"Did you count them at all?" Balam asked.

"Not once. I closed my hand and I thanked him, and I walked home tall, a man who had traded. And at home my father took the beans and poured them out on a mat and counted them, and said nothing, and counted them again. Short by half a twenty. Ten beans. In that market, in that year, ten beans was a family's salt for a month.

"My father looked at the beans a long time. Then he said: 'You knew how to count before you could carry. The man did not take those beans from you. You gave them to him, because he stood and watched you, and you would not count under a grown man's eyes.' And he never said another word about it, then or ever."

Father shifted the salt on his back. "He was right. I could count. What I could not do, at ten years old, was count slowly while a man waited on me and watched me do it. You know how the water sits in the jar. A stranger's talking is a hand knocking on the jar, knock and knock, to keep your water jumping while his beans go by short. So remember it: a man who will not stand quiet while you count is telling you the count."

Balam walked and thought about that, with the blade against his chest. The man in the market had talked the whole time he was counting, and Balam had not known why, but he had known it in his arms before he knew it in his head, because his water had jumped, and he had let it settle, and then he had counted.

The village fires showed through the trees at last, and one of them was theirs. Grandmother had kept the fire and the pot, and Nikte had slept half the day and was awake like an owl, and wanted everything told at once, and wanted to hold the blade. Balam did not let her, and Mother did not make him. But Father brought out the little clay bird and put it in her hands, and while they ate the hot food Balam told the day — the road, and the wall, and the bell standing in the clay where the wax had been, and the drink that the beans were ground into.

"You drank the money," Nikte said. Nobody answered her, and she blew the whistle until Mother took it and set it up in the roof poles for the night.

Grandmother went home to her own fire before the rain came, and the rain came while they were finishing, so that nobody had to carry anything through it. Father set the new blades into the roof, and Balam's small one went in beside his planting stick, so that over him where he lay there was now a row of things that were his: the stick, and the blade, and, out behind the house in the dark, the third log, working.

By the fire the voices went down into the low evening talk.

"Salt for the year," Mother said. "And the blade."

"And cacao left over," Father said. "There are years a man walks that road home light. This was not one of them."

The fire ticked.

"The wax man tried the boy," Father said.

"And?"

"The boy tried him back."

Mother laughed, low, and said something under it that Balam did not hear, and the rain went on. Half a day to the north, behind its long wall, the city was going on in the dark — the lanes, and the fires, and the little bells put away under the caster's roof — and Balam went to sleep on the sound of the rain, and over him in the roof the small blade lay beside the planting stick, waiting.

Chapter Four: The Water

Song for the Water

The rain goes into the drinking stoneAnd gathers down below,And where the stone roof fell awayThe jars go down in a row.

So roll the cord along your kneeAnd lay it back the other,For every strand would fly apartDid each not hold its brother.

The steps go down, the jars come up,As long as the village stands,And every hollow in the stoneWas worn by carrying hands.

The rain stopped.

By then the maize stood as high as Father's chest, and planting day was a long way behind them, and the rain did not stop the way a jar stops pouring. The mornings came up clear, and in the afternoons the cloud towers still built themselves over the woodland to the east, dark underneath, the way they had all season, and everyone still looked up at them, and then the towers came apart in the evening light without letting anything down, and the stars came out behind them. After the first day nobody spoke of it. After the fourth day Father stood in the dooryard at dusk watching the clouds come apart, and Balam stood with him, and neither of them said what they were watching.

In the field, the war had changed. The birds had given up when the plants grew past pulling, and the long war of shouting and throwing was over for a while, and the new war was weeds. "First the birds," Father said, hoeing along his rows with a wooden blade, "then the weeds, then the birds again when the ears fill. A field is quiet the way a market is quiet. Never." Balam weeded behind him down the rows, and as the dry days went on the maize leaves began to speak differently, a papery sound they had not made before.

All season the rain itself had carried half the water: the jars that stood under the eaves filled at every storm, and most of what the family drank and cooked with was the roof's water. Now the eave jars went empty one after another and stayed empty, and every cup the village drank had to come up out of the cenote, and the water-carrying doubled.

The path to the cenote was the oldest path in the village, worn down through the dirt to the stone itself, and now the village walked it morning and evening. The cenote lay just beyond the last houses, a great round hole in the gray rock floor of the world, wider than three houses, with trees standing around its lip and leaning over it. When you came to the edge of it out of the heat, cool air stood up out of the hole like a breath, and it smelled of wet stone and still water, and it was the best air of the whole day. Steps went down into it, cut into the living rock, turning as they went, each tread worn to a hollow in its middle, and at the bottom of the steps a ledge of stone stood at the water, and the last step of all lay under the water to the depth of a hand.

The water itself lay still and clear, and the sky showed in it, so that when Balam looked down past the ledge he was looking down at sky. The roots of the trees at the lip came down through cracks in the rock, bare in the air the whole way, grown down until they touched the water, and small fish stood in the lit part and were gone when a shadow touched them. Mother said a word to the water before the first jar went in, the way Father said a word to the bees, and the jars were filled and carried up, one behind another, all morning and all evening, on the backs and the heads of the village.

Balam knew what became of the rain, because Father had shown him where to watch. After every storm, water lay in the hollows of the limestone in gray sheets, and by the next day it was gone, and it had not all dried into the air; most of it had sunk. The gray stone is full of small ways through, Father said, and rain that falls anywhere on the whole country goes down into it and keeps going down, and gathers in the dark underneath — under the fields and the woods and the village and the white road, all of it lying together down there in the dark. A cenote is a place where the stone roof over that dark water fell in, long ago, and left it open to the sky.

Their own big storage jar never went down at all. It stood at the lip, and a smaller jar did the going down and coming up, cradled in a net of rope, and the rope ran over the lip's edge in a groove worn smooth and round, where every rope before it had run. Father hauled the little jar up drawing after drawing and emptied it into the big one, and it was the rope that ended the morning's work early. On the last drawing Father did not coil the rope. He ran it through his hands the whole length, slowly, turning it, the way he had turned his worn blade in the evening light, and in three places the rope was furred pale and thin, and in one place, near the middle, it had gone flat.

The rope at the lip was the village's rope, and the keeping of it went around the households, year by year, and this year the keeping was theirs.

"There is more mending in this rope than rope," Father said. "A rope is made before it breaks. After it breaks, it is late to make it." He looked at the sky, which was clear and meant to stay clear. "The field can spare us. We will make rope."

The rope plants grew at the stony edges of the fields, where nothing else wanted to grow. They were agaves: gray-green plants with no trunk that Balam could see, only stiff leaves rising one out of another, each leaf broad as his two hands at its base and as long as he was tall, edged with little teeth down both sides, and ending in a black point the length of the first joint of a finger. Father showed him the cutting. "First the thorn," he said, and nicked the black point off the leaf he wanted before anything else, and then ran his blade down both edges where hands would hold, shaving the little teeth away. "The point stabs and the edges saw. The point first, always. Then the edges, where your hand will go." Then the blade went in at the base of the leaf, low, where it was pale, and the leaf came off heavy and wet inside, and was laid aside, and the plant stood with its wound and did not care; it had forty more.

Father wrapped the back of Balam's blade in folded leaf and cord until it filled his hand, and the blade did its first true work there. The leaf base was thick, and the blade was small, and it would not go through at one cut, so Father showed him the way of it: cut partway through from above, then bear the leaf down so that the cut gapes open, then finish the cut inside the gape. Balam learned it, and learned to keep his holding hand behind the blade and never before it, and by midday his hands knew the work and his arms knew they had done it, and there was a bundle of leaves as long as sleeping mats lying between them.

At home the leaves were laid one at a time across a smooth log, and scraped. Father scraped with a flat stick of hard wood, edge-on, pinning the leaf and drawing the stick down its length again and again, and the green flesh of the leaf came away in wet ribbons, and what stayed behind was fiber: long pale strands, straight as falling rain, running the whole length of the leaf. Balam scraped the next leaf, and tore his fiber twice by hurrying, and slowed down, and did not tear it again. The fibers were rinsed and wrung and spread on the thatch in the sun, and the dry days that had stopped the rain dried them fast and well, and for two days the roof of the house wore pale hair.

On the third day Father sat in the shade with the dry fiber and said, "Now watch."

He took strands together in a bundle and rolled them down his bare thigh with his palm, away from himself, and the strands turned around each other and became a cord. He rolled and fed in new strands and rolled, and the cord grew and did not thin, and when he had two cords he did a thing Balam did not expect: he laid them side by side and rolled them back the other way, toward himself, and the two cords wrapped each other and became one rope.

"Each cord is twisted one way," Father said. "Then the cords together are turned back the other way. Now each cord is trying to untwist itself, all the time, forever, and it cannot, because its brother holds it. That fighting is what a rope is. A rope that lies easy is only string."

Balam rolled cord until the skin of his thigh was red and the cord ran even, and Father laid the cords up into rope, and the rope grew across the afternoon, and Nikte carried the finished end around the dooryard on her shoulder like a snake she had defeated, which was allowed, because carrying it could not hurt it. By evening there was a rope longer than the old one and fatter, pale and new-smelling, and the old rope came down from the lip and was cut into short lengths, for jar slings and bundle ties, because the old rope is the wage of whoever makes the new, and it had years of small work left in it even if its big work was done.

The new rope's first haul came up steady, and the little jar did not spin in its net, and Father looked at the rope a moment, and coiled it, and hung it.

It was two mornings after that that Nikte lost her gourd. She had come down for water holding Mother's hand, which was the rule and the whole of the rule, and at the lip she leaned to watch the little jar go down, and her water gourd went instead, out of her other hand, turning over and over the whole way down, and clapped onto the water, and floated.

"A gourd can be fetched," Mother said. "You cannot. That is why the rule is the hand."

"And it will be fetched," Father said, "because nothing stays in the drinking water that is not water."

They went down the steps, Father and Balam, and the gourd had drifted out past the ledge, turning a little, just beyond an arm's reach. Balam had trimmed the hooked pole himself, a long pole with a fork left at its end, his blade taking the fork's tips down to stubs, and now he lay flat on the wet stone of the ledge with the pole out over the water, and Father's hands closed around his ankles like two ropes. The cool breath of the place came up past his face, and the water below him was clear a long way down and then dark, and Balam held still and let the gourd's own drifting bring it, and hooked the neck of it, and drew it in, and it bumped the ledge and was caught. Going back up, he counted the steps for the first time. There were twenty and seven.

At the top Nikte took the gourd back and looked into it.

"The water spilled out," she said, and it had; it had gone back into the cenote on the way down, which Balam told her, and he told her too where all the water came from, the way he knew it: the rain sinking through the stone, the dark water lying under everything, the roof that had fallen in. Nikte listened to the whole thing. Then she poured her cup out onto the dirt and sat down next to the wet spot to wait for it at the cenote, and nobody could move her until supper.

The days stayed dry, and the maize spoke its papery talk, and the ash rings at least were easy to keep, for nothing packed them and Balam laid them fresh each evening in the dry dust. And in the middle of the dry days, on a weeding morning, the field gave its first food.

Balam had been watching one squash since it was the size of his fist, low under its great rough leaves in the hills where the ash had lain deepest, and every weeding day it was bigger, and now it lay there the size of his two hands together, and the stem of it had gone dry and hard. Father pressed his thumbnail against the rind and his thumbnail did not go in. "This one," he said, and cut it, and split it in halves on a flat stone.

"Seeds first," Mother said, the way she had said salt first, and scraped them out onto a broad leaf, every one, pulp and all, to be washed and dried at home for the next planting. Then the halves went beside the coals of a small fire at the field's edge, rind to the heat and flesh to the sky, and they were never flipped, only nudged around the coals with two sticks so that the rind blackened evenly and the flesh steamed soft in its own shell, and Mother salted them from a little gourd of the salt that had come home from Mayapan, and it was passed from hand to hand on pieces of its own rind and eaten hot.

It was sweet the way maize is sweet, plainly, from far inside, and Balam ate his share and then the soft part near the rind that Nikte left, and thought that it had come up out of the black field, out of the flat pale seeds, out of the hills where the ash had lain deepest, and that the field had done the next part in the dark, the way Father had said it would. Father ate leaning against a stump with his eyes half shut, and looked a long time down the rows, and said nothing, and Balam sat by him and said nothing either, and that was the meal.

In the hot evenings Grandmother came to their fire, because her own house held the day's heat longer than theirs, and she sat with her back against the house post and her hands going through the bowl of washed squash seeds, sorting, while the sky in the east built its towers and took them apart. It was on one of those evenings that Balam asked about the steps.

"Who cut them?" he asked. "The steps in the cenote. They're worn in their middles."

Grandmother's hands went on sorting.

"My grandfather cut them," she said. "Did nobody ever tell you that? Then sit, and I will."

The Story of the Steps

"When my grandfather was a young man," Grandmother said, "there were no steps at the cenote. There was a ladder, poles lashed with cord, standing down against the rock, and every jar of water this village drank came up that ladder on somebody's back. The ladder was wet at the bottom and old at the top, and it was mended the way a ladder is mended, which is after it lets somebody down.

"Then there came a year the rain forgot. The maize came up short and the water went down low, farther down than anyone had seen it, until the ladder did not reach and had to be pieced longer, and worse. All that year the village climbed up out of that hole slowly, carrying its water on a bad ladder, and my grandfather, who was young and had no say in anything, stood at the lip one morning and said, to nobody, that a hole this important should have stairs.

"The men laughed. The ladder had always been the ladder. So he did not argue with them. He got a hammerstone and a pointed pick of chert, and he went down before field work while the light was still gray, and he began to cut the first step. Chip, and chip, and chip. Stone talks slowly. A step is wide, and deep enough for a wet foot, and he was one man cutting before breakfast.

"For a long time the only thing he got was laughed at. Then one morning there was another man cutting beside him, one of the ones who had laughed loudest, and he never said why, and my grandfather never asked. Then there were three. By the end of the dry season every man who had laughed owned a hammerstone, and the steps went down the rock the way you have walked them, turning with the wall, twenty and seven of them, and the last pole of the old ladder made a cooking fire, and nobody spoke over it.

"My grandfather has been under the ground these many years. But every household in this village has carried its water up his stairs since. The hollows your feet found in the middles of the steps — his steps were cut flat. Every foot since has done the wearing. Wood rots, and rope wears, and water stays where it stays. Stone is how you talk to the people who are not born yet."

Balam thought about the hollows under his feet that morning, and the fork-tipped pole, and the new rope at the lip.

"Did the water come back?" he asked. "After the year the rain forgot?"

"The water has always come back," Grandmother said, and went on sorting seeds, and that was the end of the story.

That night Balam heard the low evening talk begin by the fire after Grandmother had gone home through the dark.

"Mak left a haunch at the door this evening," Mother said. "Deer. He was gone before I turned around."

"I saw it," Father said.

"He knows it was you. The far rows."

"He knows it was somebody," Father said. "That is as much as he needs to know." The fire ticked. "The clouds were thicker this evening."

"They were," Mother said.

And two evenings later the rain came back. It came the way it had come the first time, heard before it was felt, a hiss far off coming through the leaves, and then it was on the thatch, and the whole village sat in its houses and listened to it and nobody said anything worth saying. Balam lay on his mat with the roar coming up around him and thought of where it was all going: off the eaves, into the hollows of the stone, down through the small dark ways inside the rock, going where it went, under the field, under the path, under the whole standing village, to the still water waiting at the bottom of the twenty and seven steps. The new rope would be hanging at the lip in the dark, wet through, its fibers swelling and drawing the twist tighter, so that the rain only made it hold harder. And the sound of the rain going into the cenote would be going on down there all night, steady and low, the way the bees went on inside the log, working in the dark, and morning would come, and the jars would go down the stairs.